Customer Effort Score

Find out why or why not Customer Effort Score (CES) outperforms Net Promoter and Customer Satisfaction scores. Is it better to satisfy rather than delight? Should 'making it easy' for your customers be your biggest priority?

Customer Effort Score (CES) is measured by asking a single question: “How much effort did you personally have to put forth to handle your request?”

14 January 2013

Customer Effort Score (CES) is the new hot metric for customer service. (CES) has been widely discussed since the HBR Article, Stop Trying to Delight Your Customers (July, 2010), where Customer Effort Score was touted as being a better predictor of customer loyalty than Net Promoter Score or First Contact Resolution. While CES is an important metric and arguably the best metric to focus your service operation, there is no such thing as a “magic metric”. Getting results from implementing CES depends on execution and focus.

2 January 2013

For some firms Customer Effort Score (CES) may appear as the
next Net Promoter Score. The compelling proposition is that firms should not
obsess so much about ‘delighting’ customers as get the basics right! Make it
easy or effortless for them. This is all well and good, but as with most things
in life the law of ‘it depends’ applies. It depends on what you are selling, if
it’s a theme park, focusing on the amount of effort customers expend is not
really going to make for a great customer experience although the reverse may
well be true if you are a poor call centre.